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“... from all that over-quoted war poetry, but it can be worrying stuff for those who grew up in the shadow of that war. Here are two academics, with the advantage of eighty years of hindsight and well-tended archives, appraising the skill and judgment of a knot of hard-pushed military knights who, by an accident of history, found themselves commanding armies ...”

“... is in government the PLP has no part in the choice of ministers (though it is understood that ‘shadow’ ministers initially have a claim on posts) and it has no formal role in the introduction and framing of legislation. The powers of the PLP, therefore, have been weak. Why this is so is itself an interesting historical question. The Labour Party has ...”

“... slipped into the room. He had been delayed, he said, by his involvement in appointing the new shadow cabinet. ‘I wouldn’t be there,’ he said with feeling, looking around the room, ‘if it wasn’t for you.’ Then he switched to the first-person plural: ‘We in the trade union movement …’ Minutes after the meeting ended, he was announced ...”

“... they go wrong; the word usually employed when they go right is ‘brilliant’. That the entire Cabinet was against it matters even less. Since assuming the Labour leadership in 1994, Blair has been opposed by the entire Shadow Cabinet and 95 per cent of the Party in virtually every important decision he has made. If ...”

“... Barbara Castle’s diary of the period 1974-76 shows more about the nature of cabinet government – even though it deals with only one Cabinet – than any previous publication, academic, political or biographical. It is, I think, better than Crossman. It gives a greater impression of immediacy; as a result, it is compulsive reading; and although I have made no checks, and it recounts many events of which I had no direct knowledge, it seems to me to be as accurate as one can expect of so personal a record ...”

“... the polls. More than half the members of the electoral commission rejected the results, casting a shadow over Ruto’s mandate. But to others he appeared to have pulled off a stunning electoral coup, defeating Odinga, a Luo, and capturing a large share of votes in Kenyatta’s largely Kikuyu base in the centre of the country. It helped that no Kikuyu ...”

“... not to mention the likelihood that such a move on Labour’s part would have blown apart the shadow cabinet and fanned the party’s smouldering civil war. Retrospectives often assume greater latitude than really existed.The hopes with which Labour entered the election campaign were not entirely delusional. The leadership expected Johnson’s deal ...”

“... to disintegrate. When the report was published I was outside the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, with family members of British soldiers killed or injured during the conflict. During the day the atmosphere swung between anxiety and expectation, celebration and anger. Chilcot’s statement given that morning at a press conference ...”

“... I was intrusive – leafed through the magazines under the TV, opened the fridge and the medicine cabinet – but stopped short of talking to the actors; sidestepped them, rather, as if not to disturb. The house wasn’t quite silent, but it was hard to tell whether or not the scuffling sounds were those of someone next door, or where the sound of the ...”

“... predecessor, Robert Buckland, sacked in the reshuffle of 15 September, was one of the last cabinet ministers who voted Remain in the EU referendum, so did well to survive as long as he did. He was a proper criminal barrister, practising for almost twenty years before becoming an MP in 2010. He was aware that austerity had left criminal justice in a ...”

“... Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she subjects everyone to the most emotionally exhausting arguments; the other is that she still interrupts everyone all the time. It makes us all absolutely furious.’ Her modus operandi, in private life as in ...”

“... for Scotland that couldn’t be done in private? Much better, surely, to have a fierce Scot in the cabinet who, in return for doing the prime minister’s bidding, was indulged in his demands, however outrageous, for cross-border subsidy. Wilson was more worried than his henchman by the advance of the SNP. He set in train a Royal Commission on the ...”

“... shadows moving beneath us. Mine in front, Akbar’s at the rear and between us the mule’s: its shadow legs, twenty feet long, jerking like a spider’s over the glowing thorn scrub. I felt happiest in the afternoons. The flat glare of noon had gone but the day was not yet over. Staring at that shadow image of our motion ...”

“... is left to chance in the portrayal of the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Valley of the Shadow of Death’? Perhaps ‘Enthusiastic Admiration is the first Principle of Knowledge – its last. Now he begins to Degrade, to Deny – to Mock.’ How would he have responded to the news that ‘Wilkes was a bit of a demagogue,’ that the Antique Schools ...”

“... preceded their arrival at the summit. Major set out to prove he could be his own man, free of her shadow. The fact that he too ultimately failed shows how long that shadow was. This pattern is now repeating itself among the farcically long list of would-be contenders for the Tory leadership. They all, in their different ...”